Senior administration officials say the White House intends to create a permanent office of global diplomacy in order to spread a positive image of the United States around the world and combat anti-Americanism, which the administration believes has been caused by the world’s failure to understand America. “A lot of the world does not like America, and it’s going to take years to change their hearts and minds,” an unnamed senior official tells the New York Times. The office will coordinate the public statements of the State, Defense, and the other departments to ensure that foreign governments, media organizations, and opinion-makers understand US policies. The Times reports that according to one official, “global diplomacy as envisioned in the new office will inject patriotism into the punishing 24-hour, seven-day news cycle.” Reports broadcast by the office would include information about both US foreign and domestic policies and would utilize the State Department’s huge communications network of American embassies and media offices. The earlier White House effort to create a more positive image of the United States was handled by the Coalition Information Center, a joint effort between the US and Britain that was led by the president’s senior advisor, Karen P. Hughes. [New York Times, 2/2/2002] The office will be formally created in July and given the name “The Office of Global Communications”
(see July 30, 2002).

Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, flies to Texas to meet with President Bush at his ranch in Crawford. Abdullah has been working to convince Arab leaders to accept a proposed peace treaty between Israel and Palestine (see April 2002), but has had no support from the White House. The course of the meeting is later paraphrased by National Security Council staffer Flynt Leverett, the head of the NSC’s Mideast affairs division. As Leverett will recall, the usually deferential Abdullah tells Bush that he has a direct question and wants a direct answer. Abdullah asks Bush: “Are you going to do anything about the Palestinian issue? If you tell me no, if it’s too difficult, if you’re not going to give it that kind of priority, just tell me. I will understand and I will never say anything critical of you or your leadership in public, but I’m going to need to make my own judgments and my own decisions about Saudi interests.” Bush attempts to stall, telling Abdullah he understands his concerns and that he will see what he can do. Abdullah refuses to be mollified. Standing up, he says: “That’s it. This meeting is over.” Bush retreats to another room with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell to discuss Abdullah’s position. Bush returns shortly thereafter and gives Abdullah his word that he will deal seriously with the Palestinian issue. “Okay,” Abdullah says. “The president of the United States has given me his word.” After the meeting, Powell calls Abdullah’s threat “the near-death experience”; Bush, rolling his eyes, says, “We sure don’t want to go through anything like that again.” As Powell later recalls, “It was a very serious moment and no one wanted to see if the Saudis were bluffing.” It is unclear whether Bush is expressing relief or making a sarcastic comment. [Esquire, 10/18/2007]

Speaking in regard to media reports of the Defense Department’s new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) (see December 31, 2001), the Defense Department issues a statement downplaying its meaning. The statement reads in part: “We will not discuss the classified details of military planning or contingencies, nor will we comment on selective and misleading leaks. The Nuclear Posture Review is required by law. It is a wide-ranging analysis of the requirements for deterrence in the 21st century. This review of the US nuclear posture is the latest in a long series of reviews since the development of nuclear weapons. It does not provide operational guidance on nuclear targeting or planning. The Department of Defense continues to plan for a broad range of contingencies and unforeseen threats to the United States and its allies. We do so in order to deter such attacks in the first place. Of particular significance in the new Nuclear Posture Review is President Bush’s decision to reduce operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons by two-thirds, a decision made possible by the new strategic relationship with Russia.” [Federation of American Scientists, 3/9/2002] The Defense Department is being deceptive in its attempt to downplay the NPR, which in fact is a new operational policy that plans for pre-emptive nuclear strikes against countries attempting to create weapons of mass destruction, if the White House deems such strikes necessary. [Federation of American Scientists, 11/5/2007]

After the existence of the Defense Department’s new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) (see December 31, 2001) is leaked to the media, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, goes on CNN to claim that the document has little real meaning in an operational sense, but instead is just a policy document that outlines the general US deterrence strategies towards nations with weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear weapons are just one part of that strategy, Myers says. Myers says that the document merely preserves the president’s options “in case this country or our friends and allies were attacked with weapons of mass destruction, be they nuclear, biological, chemical, or for that matter high explosives.” He adds: “It’s been the policy of this country for a long time that the president would always reserve the right up to and including the use of nuclear weapons if that was appropriate. So that continues to be the policy.” [CNN, 3/10/2002] Myers’ attempts to downplay the NPR are inaccurate, as it is a new operational policy that plans for pre-emptive nuclear strikes against countries attempting to create weapons of mass destruction, if the White House deems such strikes necessary. [Federation of American Scientists, 11/5/2007]

Venezuelan Rear Admiral Carlos Molina reportedly attends meetings with US officials during the weeks leading up to the April 11 overthrow of Hugo Chavez, according to several retired Venezuelan military officers and members of the post-coup provisional government. Molina however denies this in a post-coup interview with the Washington Post. According to Molinas, he had not had any contact with US officials “for many months.” [Washington Post, 4/21/2002, pp. A01]

After exhaustive discussions, White House negotiator Charles Pritchard is able to convince the North Koreans that the US is serious about wanting to reopen negotiations (see Late March, 2001 and February 2002). Once the North Koreans make their overtures for reopening talks, President Bush once again reverses course, abandoning the 2001 policy changes in favor of what officials call a “bold approach” that will deal with all outstanding issues, including nuclear proliferation and human rights abuses, without protracted negotiations. The opportunity to test Bush’s rhetoric never comes; North Korea will soon admit to having the capability to enrich uranium in violation of the Agreed Framework (see October 4, 2002), a development that radically alters US-North Korean relations for the worse. [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 238]

Flynt Leverett, the newly named head of Mideast affairs for the National Security Council (see December 2001-January 2002), has worked hard for the last months to persuade Bush administration officials to consider a proposal by Saudi Arabia for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The proposal, originated by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah, calls for “full normalization” of relations between Israel and Arab nations in exchange for Israel’s “full withdrawal” from the occupied territories. Abdullah promised that he can persuade all the Arab nations of the region to sign off on the accords. But even with concessions insisted upon by the Israelis, the Bush administration refused to consider the deal. Even after Abdullah persuaded every nation of the Arab League to sign his proposal, the White House refused to listen. In April, Secretary of State Colin Powell, accompanied by Leverett, travels to the Middle East to negotiate an end to an Israeli siege of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s compound. Powell believes he has authorization from the White House to explore what are called “political horizons,” diplomatic shorthand for peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine. Powell and Leverett use the Saudi proposal as a springboard for discussions. On their final day in the Middle East, Leverett, with a group of senior American officials, is trying to hammer out Powell’s final speech when a telephone call from the White House short-circuits the procedure. On the other end, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley tells Leverett: “Tell Powell he is not authorized to talk about a political horizon. Those are formal instructions.” Leverett responds by telling Hadley it is a bad idea to abruptly stop negotiations. As he later recalls the conversation, Leverett tells Hadley, “It’s bad policy and it’s also humiliating for Powell, who has been talking to heads of state about this very issue for the last 10 days.” Hadley retorts: “It doesn’t matter. There’s too much resistance from [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and the VP [Dick Cheney]. Those are the instructions.” Powell is furious at the instructions. “What is it they’re afraid of?” he demands. “Who the hell are they afraid of?” Leverett responds, “I don’t know sir.” Powell will later recall, “I had major problems with the White House on what I wanted to say.” [Esquire, 10/18/2007]

The CIA files a Senior Executive Security Briefs stating: “[D]issident military factions, including some disgruntled senior officers and a group of radical junior officers, are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chavez, possibly as early as this month…. To provoke military action, the plotters may try to exploit unrest stemming from opposition demonstrations slated for later this month or ongoing strikes at the state-owned oil company PSVSa.” The brief also notes, “The level of detail in the reported plans [censored] targets Chavez and 10 other senior officials for arrest—lends credence to the information, but military and civilian contacts note that neither group appears ready to lead a successful coup and may bungle the attempt by moving too quickly.” But is also says that “repeated warnings that the US will not support any extraconstitutional moves to oust Chavez probably have given pause to the plotters.” [Central Intelligence Agency, 4/6/2002; Newsday, 11/24/2004; Associated Press, 12/3/2004] Senior Executive Security Briefs are one level below the highest-level Presidential Daily Briefs and are distributed to roughly 200 top-level US officials. [Newsday, 11/24/2004]

The Bush administration, prodded by State Department official John Bolton, refuses to certify that Russia is in compliance with international accords banning chemical and biological weapons. As a result, Russia is no longer eligible for State Department and Defense Department funding for nuclear nonproliferation programs (see January 10, 2001 and After). The Clinton administration harbored similar concerns, but believed that helping Russia secure its loose nuclear weapons and technology was more important than holding Russia in noncompliance in the CBW accords. In related negotiations, Bolton successfully impedes progress in negotiations in a liability agreement with the US over the securing of “loose nukes”; Bolton insists on absolving US government officials, as well as private firms and personnel, of any liability for accidents or even sabotage encountered as part of the nonproliferation programs. The dispute will not be resolved until September 2006. [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 209]

Douglas Feith (right) and Ariel Sharon (left), time unknown. [Source: Canal+]Karen Kwiatkowski escorts about half a dozen Israelis, including some generals, from the first floor reception area of the Pentagon to Douglas Feith’s office. “We just followed them, because they knew exactly where they were going and moving fast,” she later explains. The Israelis are not required to sign in as is required under special regulations put into effect after the 9/11 attacks. Kwiatkowski speculates that Feith’s office may have waived this requirement for the Israelis so that there would be no record of the meeting. [Inter Press Service, 8/7/2003]

The Bush administration formally withdraws the United States from the International Criminal Court (ICC). In a letter to Secretary-General of the UN Kofi Annan, US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton writes: “This is to inform you, in connection with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted on July 17, 1998, that the United States does not intend to become a party to the treaty. Accordingly, the United States has no legal obligations arising from its signature on December 31, 2000. The United States requests that its intention not to become a party, as expressed in this letter, be reflected in the depositary’s status lists relating to this treaty.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says, “The United States will regard as illegitimate any attempt by the court or state parties to the treaty to assert the ICC’s jurisdiction over American citizens.” The ICC dates back to the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and serves as the world’s first and most influential war crimes tribunal. The US did not become a signatory until former President Bill Clinton’s last day in office. [US Department of State, 5/6/2002; New York Times, 5/7/2002; American Forces Press Service, 5/7/2002; Carter, 2004, pp. 278; Organizations Coalition for the International Criminal Court, 1/2/2006] Bolton’s letter serves to both withdraw the US from the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, and relieves the US of its obligations under the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. That agreement prohibits the signatories of international treaties from taking steps to undermine the treaties they sign, even if they have not ratified them. [New York Times, 5/7/2002]US Will Not be 'Second-Guessed' - The Bush administration defends its action, contending that the treaty infringes on US sovereignty because, under its provisions, an international prosecutor answerable to no one could initiate politically motivated or frivolous suits against US troops, military officers or officials. [New York Times, 5/7/2002; BBC, 7/13/2002] “We do not want anything to do it,” an administration spokesman has said. The ICC is “unaccountable to the American people,” and “has no obligation to respect the constitutional rights of our citizens,” Rumsfeld says. Secretary of State Colin Powell says the ICC undermines US judicial sovereignty and the US could not be held accountable to a higher authority that might try “to second-guess the United States after we have tried somebody.… We are the leader in the world with respect to bringing people to justice.… We have supported a tribunal for Yugoslavia, the tribunal for Rwanda, we’re trying to get the tribunal for Sierra Leone set up.… We have the highest standards of accountability of any nation on the face of the Earth.” [American Forces Press Service, 5/7/2002; Carter, 2004, pp. 278]'On the Wrong Side of History' - Others do not share the administration’s rationale. Amnesty International’s Alex Arriaga says: “It’s outrageous. The US should be championing justice. It shouldn’t be running it down.” Judge Richard Goldstone, the first chief ICC prosecutor at the war crimes trials surrounding the former Yugoslavia, adds, “The US have really isolated themselves and are putting themselves into bed with the likes of China, Yemen, and other undemocratic countries.” Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch says: “The administration is putting itself on the wrong side of history. Unsigning the treaty will not stop the court. It will only throw the United States into opposition against the most important new institution for enforcing human rights in fifty years. The timing… couldn’t be worse for Washington. It puts the Bush administration in the awkward position of seeking law-enforcement cooperation in tracking down terrorist suspects while opposing an historic new law-enforcement institution for comparably serious crimes.” [Carter, 2004, pp. 278]

In New York, the first UN Children’s Summit adopts an action plan to improve children’s lives in the coming decade. One of the Summit’s most notable achievements is a plan to reduce the mortality rates of infants and children under five, and of mothers after childbirth, by at least one third by 2010. Certain issues are hotly debated during the Summit. For example, the US sides with the Vatican, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Iraq in arguing for language promoting sexual abstinence before marriage and traditional family values and against the inclusion of any statement in the Summit’s final declaration sanctioning abortion. The US wants the final document to include a footnote that specifically excludes abortion from a passage stating that children have a right to “reproductive health services.” As a compromise, the final agreement drops any reference to “services.” Also, at the insistence of the Bush administration, the final document excludes the United States from a requirement prohibiting the death penalty or life imprisonment for those under the age of 18. The US also successfully argues for the removal of a resolution condemning Israel for violence against Palestinian children and the deprivation of their human rights. [Nation, 1/16/2002; BBC, 5/8/2002; Associated Press, 5/11/2002; BBC, 5/11/2002] The Bush administration also opposes referring to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child as a global “standard” for children’s rights. [Associated Press, 5/11/2002] The 1989 Convention established a child’s right to good quality education, protection from abuse and healthcare, outlawed child labor and child trafficking, and prohibited nations from enlisting children under the age of 15 in their armed services. [United Nations, 11/20/1989; BBC, 9/18/1999; BBC, 11/8/1999; UNICEF, 2/24/2005] It was signed by the US, but neither the Clinton nor Bush administration has submitted the convention to Congress for ratification. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most universally accepted human rights instrument in history. The only other country that hasn’t ratified it is Somalia, which is unable to because it has no recognized government. [BBC, 9/18/1999; BBC, 11/8/1999; Associated Press, 5/11/2002; UNICEF, 2/24/2005]

Bush and Putin at a Kremlin news conference announcing the SORT signing. [Source: September 11 News (.com)]Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin sign a joint US-Russian treaty, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), agreeing to reduce their strategic nuclear arsenals from some 6,000 warheads, respectively, to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads apiece. Bush allies hail the agreement as evidence of Bush’s willingness to negotiate with other nations and his desire to reduce and perhaps end the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation. However, the treaty is very similar in content to an informal agreement between Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin in 1997. And SORT has far more flexibility built into its framework than either Clinton or Yeltsin had discussed: it does not call for the destruction of delivery vehicles, as the START I and II agreements had (see May 1982 and After), nor does it call for the destruction of warheads themselves, as START III had. In reality, either side can merely remove weapons from missiles and bombers, store them, and redeploy them in the future. Secretary of State Colin Powell will reassure conservative senators in June that “the treaty will allow you to have as many warheads as you want.” Arms reduction opponent John Bolton (see June 2001) approves the treaty, later noting that it “provided ‘exit ramps’ to allow for rapid change.” The treaty—only 500 words long—provides for no verification protocols whatsoever. And, as author J. Peter Scoblic will later write, “in a bit of diplomatic quantum mechanics, the treaty’s warhead limit was slated to take effect on the very day that it expired—December 31, 2012—meaning it would be valid for no more than twenty-four hours.” Scoblic will conclude that the treaty, in line with Bush’s “new strategic framework” (see May 1, 2001), is “still designed to fight nothing less than an all-out nuclear war with Russia.” [Federation of American Scientists, 5/24/2002; Scoblic, 2008, pp. 177-178] Bush sees little need for the treaty, or any treaty, saying that “mutual trust” between the US and Russia should suffice (see July 2001). He agrees to this treaty in what Scoblic later calls a “condescending” manner, saying, “If we need to write it down on a piece of paper, I’ll do that.” Bolton will later call the treaty “the end of arms control.” [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 184]

The King of Jordan, Abdullah II, visits Washington to discuss the Israel-Palestinian peace process. Abdullah’s visit comes on the heels of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah’s earlier visit, where he threatened to break off discussions with the US if President Bush refused to deal seriously with the matter (see Spring 2002). Though the Saudi leader seemingly shook up Bush with his unusually direct insistence on American action, Bush appears surprised that the Jordanian king is also concerned with the issue. Bush listens politely to Abdullah’s appeal, and says that the king’s idea of a “road map to peace” sounds reasonable. National Security Council official Flynt Leverett, the head of the NSC’s Mideast affairs division, promises Abdullah that such a “road map” will be drawn up by the end of 2002. No such proposal is ever completed; neoconservatives in the Defense Department (Donald Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith), the Vice President’s Office (John Hannah and Lewis “Scooter” Libby), and the NSC (Elliott Abrams) continue to oppose the idea, calling it nothing but a reward to the Palestinians for “bad behavior” (see December 2001-January 2002). Only if Palestine rejects terrorism and implements democracy will the US enter into negotiations, they insist, regardless of what promises Bush has made. [Esquire, 10/18/2007]

The Bush administration submits a proposed resolution to the UN Security Council that would grant indefinite immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) (see July 17, 1998) to all UN peacekeeping military personnel who are from nations that do not accept the court’s jurisdiction. The proposal appeals to Article 16 of the Rome Statute which stipulates that the UN Security Council can grant deferrals on a temporary, case-by-case basis for nationals accused of war crimes who are from countries not party to the treaty. The US recommends that this provision for conditional immunity be universally pre-applied to all cases involving US military personnel engaged in UN peacekeeping. Immunity would be granted for a period of 12 months—but automatically and unconditionally renewed every year. As such, US troops would effectively be exempt from the jurisdiction of the ICC since it would take a UN Security Council resolution to end the automatic renewals and since the US holds veto power in the council. [New York Times, 5/7/2002; Boston Globe, 5/23/2002; Boston Globe, 7/1/2002; Independent, 7/4/2002] The US proposal is backed by threats that the US will withdraw its troops from international peacekeeping missions, starting with Bosnia (see June 30, 2002), and block funds to those missions as well. [Boston Globe, 5/23/2002; Agence France-Presse, 7/9/2002]

The Reverend Jerry Vines. [Source: Thomas White]Reverend Jerry Vines, pastor of a large Baptist church in Florida, denounces Islam as being responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and criticizes America’s propensity for “religious pluralism” as making the nation vulnerable to further attacks as well as causing other social ills. In his statement, made to an audience at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Vines insults Islam and its founder, the Prophet Muhammed: “They would have us believe that Islam is just as good as Christianity,” Vines says. “Christianity was founded by the virgin-born son of God, Jesus Christ. Islam was founded by Muhammad, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives, the last one of which was a 9-year-old girl.” Muslims do not worship the same god as Christians do, he adds: “And I will tell you Allah is not Jehovah, either. Jehovah’s not going to turn you into a terrorist.” White House press secretary Scott McClellan says after Vines’s remarks that President Bush “believes Islam is a religion that teaches peace. The president believes in religious tolerance and respects people of all faiths.” The day after Vines’s incendiary remarks, Bush addresses the SBC meeting via satellite to extol Baptists’ tolerance, praising their “extraordinary influence” on American history and saying, “Baptists were among the earliest champions of religious tolerance and freedom.” Vines’s remarks echo earlier attacks on Islam by other prominent evangelicals, including Franklin Graham (see October 2001). Other evangelical Christians, including the Reverend Jerry Falwell, rush to support Vines’s remarks, but Jewish leaders and mainstream Protestant groups join American Muslims in denouncing the remarks. Abraham Foxman, the director of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, calls Vines’s remarks “deplorable,” and says such inflammatory language is “not surprising coming from the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention, which has a track record of denigrating and delegitimizing other religions.” [Washington Post, 6/20/2002]

The Heritage Foundation sponsors a celebration of the US’s impending withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (see May 26, 1972 and June 14, 2002). The invitation reads: “ABM: RIP. For 30 years, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty has served to bolster the policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and impose crippling restrictions on the nation’s missile defense programs (see March 23, 1983). President Bush, recognizing the inappropriateness of MAD and the policy of vulnerability to missile attack, announced on December 13, 2001 (see December 13, 2001) that the United States is withdrawing from the treaty.” Several hundred conservatives, including senators, House representatives, generals, policy makers, and academics, gather in the caucus room of the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, taking part in what one participant calls “a cheerful wake for a flawed treaty.” Author J. Peter Scoblic will write: “The mood was, not surprisingly, buoyant, for ‘flawed’ was really too mild a description for the loathing the assembled crowd felt for the agreement. To the right wing, the ABM Treaty had symbolized everything that was wrong with American foreign policy during the Cold War: negotiating with evil, fearing nuclear war instead of preparing to win it (see Spring 1982 and January 17, 1983), and abandoning faith in American exceptionalism and divine superiority.” [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 157]

The Bush administration vetoes a UN Security Council Resolution that would have extended the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia for the next six months. The Council however agrees to extend the mission’s mandate for 72 hours, during which time it hopes members will be able to resolve a dispute with the US. [Boston Globe, 7/1/2002; BBC, 7/1/2002; BBC, 7/1/2002] The Bush administration vetoed the resolution because UN Security Council members did not accept a proposal (see June 2002) that would grant indefinite immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) (see July 17, 1998) (which opens on this day) to all UN peacekeeping military personnel who are from nations that do not accept the court’s jurisdiction. Explaining Washington’s veto, US Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte explains, “With our global responsibilities, we are and will remain a special target, and cannot have our decisions second-guessed by a court whose jurisdiction we do not recognize.” [Boston Globe, 7/1/2002; BBC, 7/1/2002; BBC, 7/1/2002] If a compromise cannot be reached, UN peacekeeping forces will have to leave Bosnia. A failure to renew the UN mandated mission in Bosnia could also affect Nato’s 19,000-strong Stabilization Force in Bosnia, or S-For, which includes 3,100 Americans. “Although S-For does not legally require a Security Council mandate, some of the 19 countries contributing to it have indicated they will withdraw their troops without one,” the BBC reports. [BBC, 7/1/2002]

A secret CIA report that says North Korea is enriching “significant quantities” of uranium and this is happening with Pakistan’s help (see June 2002) is withheld from some officials at the State Department. The report, which was drafted for the White House, is classified top secret sensitive compartmentalized information, and is not provided to the State Department’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), although it is highly significant for their work. Norm Wulf, the ACDA’s deputy assistant director, will suspect that John Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control, is involved in the withholding. Wulf will say that before Bolton arrived at the State Department in 2001, intelligence about North Korea’s enrichment program and links to Pakistan had been piling up on his desk for three years. However, by 2002 Wulf thinks that he is not getting all the information he should. “I became less and less trustful of the evidence and the more clever people who saw it in its original form. Between the raw intelligence and me were several filters. There were hostile relations between Bolton, his staff, and the non-proliferation bureau.” Authors Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark will say that the CIA report “had to be buried” because administration officials “only wanted Congress to focus on Iraq, as this was where [they] were determined that US forces should go. All other threats, especially those greater than Iraq, would have to be concealed, defused, or downplayed.” [Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 336-337] The CIA report will be revealed in the press in early 2003, just before the Iraq war begins. [New Yorker, 1/27/2003]

The UN Security Council extends the mandate of the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia while its members continue to debate over a US proposal to grant all UN peacekeeping military personnel from countries not party to the Rome Statute (see July 17, 1998) immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) (see July 17, 1998). The Bush administration has made it clear that it will not support the UN mandated mission in Bosnia if the Security Council does not accept its proposal. [Agence France-Presse, 7/9/2002]

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice writes to US congresspeople, telling them that the Bush administration will continue to provide North Korea with shipments of heavy fuel oil and nuclear technology. These deliveries are in accordance with the Agreed Framework (see October 21, 1994). However, a few weeks previously the CIA had informed the White House that the Koreans had violated the framework by starting uranium enrichment, with Pakistani help (see June 2002). This meant that the Koreans had forfeited any entitlement to US assistance, but Rice, in the words of authors Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, “plumped for ignorance” of the CIA report. [New Yorker, 1/27/2003; Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 336-337]

After much debate, the UN Security Council adopts Resolution 1422 under pressure from the United States. The resolution delays, for a period of twelve months, the prosecution and investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of any UN peacekeeping personnel accused of war crimes. After one year, the delay can be extended with the passage of another resolution. The privilege applies only to personnel from states that are not party to the Rome Statute. [United Nations, 7/12/2002; New York Times, 7/13/2002] The US had previously demanded a permanent exemption (see June 2002), which was strongly opposed by the other members. The US proposed Resolution 1422 as a compromise and threatened to block future resolutions extending UN peacekeeping missions, beginning with ones in Bosnia and the Croatian peninsula of Prevlaka, if the Security Council did not adopt it. [New York Times, 7/11/2002; New York Times, 7/12/2002; New York Times, 7/13/2002] Immediately after adopting Resolution 1422, the council extends the mandates for the two UN peacekeeping missions. [New York Times, 7/13/2002] Afterwards, John Negroponte states: “Should the ICC eventually seek to detain any American, the United States would regard this as illegitimate—and it would have serious consequences. No nation should underestimate our commitment to protect our citizens.” [New York Times, 7/13/2002]

President Bush makes it very clear how he feels about North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. According to Bob Woodward’s book Bush at War, Bush shouts at Woodward: “I loathe Kim Jong Il!… I’ve got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these [North Korean] prison camps—they’re huge—that he uses to break up families, and to torture people.” Bush says he will not change his opinion of Kim “until he proves to the world that he has a good heart.” [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 232-233]

Nuclear Threat Initiative logo. [Source: Nuclear Threat Initiative]The US decides to oversee the removal of two nuclear weapons’ worth of nuclear material from the Vinca Institute in Serbia, part of a defunct Yugoslavian nuclear weapons program. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has cut funding for the government’s nuclear nonproliferation programs so drastically (see January 10, 2001 and After) that it is forced to rely on the efforts of a private foundation. The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), founded by former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn and media tycoon Ted Turner, contributes $5 million to the effort—double the funding contributed by the State Department. US and Serbian authorities, in conjunction with NTI, transport 5,000 rods of highly enriched uranium from the site, most likely to be stored at Russia’s Ulyanovsk Nuclear Processing Plant. “Serbia might have decided to sell this material to Iraq,” says national security expert Joseph Cirincione. “It’s a good thing for all of us that that possibility has now been eliminated.” When the operation is successfully concluded, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, whose department oversees the securing of “loose” nuclear material from around the world, learns of it through newspaper reports. [Nuclear Threat Initiative, 8/23/2002; New York Times, 8/23/2002; Scoblic, 2008, pp. 208]

More than 50 countries sign “Article 98” agreements with the US under threat of losing US military aid. Article 98 agreements, so called because the US claims they have a legal basis in Article 98 of the Rome Statute (see July 17, 1998), are bilateral immunity agreements (BIA) that prohibit both parties from extraditing the other’s current or former government officials, military and other personnel to the International Criminal Court (ICC) . With the exception of a few close allies, countries that are party to the ICC (see July 17, 1998) and have not signed the agreements will become ineligible for US military aid when on July 1, 2003 (see July 1, 2003) Section 2007 of the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (see August 2, 2002) goes into effect. The Bush administration hopes that the “Article 98” agreements will protect US troops and officials from being prosecuted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for any alleged war crimes committed in a country that is party to the court. Critics say the BIAs are inexcusable attempts to gain impunity from war crimes. Some countries sign the agreement despite popular opposition and ask the Bush administration not to make the agreements public. [CNS News, 8/5/2002; New York Times, 8/7/2002; New York Times, 8/10/2002; Coalition for the International Court, 9/2003 ]

US President George Bush signs the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (HR 4775), making it Public Law 107-206. Section 2007, written by Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, prohibits the United States from providing military assistance to any nation that is party to the International Criminal Court (see July 17, 1998). Only countries that receive a special waiver from the president or that sign so-called “Article 98” agreements (see August 2002-July 1, 2003) will be exempt from the prohibition. The exemption is also extended to a select few other counties (Taiwan, NATO members, and “major non-NATO allies” like Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand). Section 2007 will go into effect on July 1, 2003, one year after the Rome Statute entered into force. Section 2008 of HR 4775 gives the president authority to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any person… being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court.” [US Congress, 7/24/2002; New York Times, 8/10/2002]

Israel effectively withdraws its signature from the Rome Statute (see July 17, 1998). In a letter to the UN, the Israeli government writes, “[I]n connection with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted on 17 July 1998,… Israel does not intend to become a party to the treaty. Accordingly, Israel has no legal obligations arising from its signature on 31 December 2000. Israel requests that its intention not to become a party, as expressed in this letter, be reflected in the depositary’s status lists relating to this treaty.”
[Organizations Coalition for the International Criminal Court, 1/2/2006]

Vice President Cheney and his staff have become increasingly reliant on intelligence from Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress (INC—see Early 2003). Cheney’s senior aide John Hannah, the liaison between Cheney and the INC, has become increasingly invested in the exile group. “He relied on Ahmed Chalabi for insights and advice,” a Bush administration official will later recall. Cheney has himself become an increasingly vocal Chalabi advocate. At a meeting of President Bush’s National Security Council, the State Department and Pentagon officials argue over whether to increase funding to the INC. Cheney, a former NSC staffer will recall, “weighed in, in a really big way. He said, ‘We’re getting ready to go to war, and we’re nickel-and-diming the INC at a time when they’re providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi WMD.’” The fact that no one else, particularly the CIA, could confirm anything the INC was providing was merely proof that the CIA was recklessly disregarding INC intelligence. The administration official will say that before long, “there was something of a willingness to give [INC- provided intelligence] greater weight” than that offered by the intelligence community. In return, Cheney’s aides tried to inject their intelligence into the CIA’s own conduits. One CIA analyst will recall that both Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, “come out there loaded with crap from OSP [the Office of Special Plans—see September 2002], reams of information from Chalabi’s people” on both terrorism and WMD. One of the main channels into the CIA for Cheney and his staff is Alan Foley, the director of the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center. Cheney’s office inundates Foley with questions about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, particularly about Iraq’s supposed attempts to purchase uranium from Niger (see Between Late 2000 and September 11, 2001, October 15, 2001, October 18, 2001, November 20, 2001, February 5, 2002, March 1, 2002, Late April or Early May 2002-June 2002, and Late June 2002). At first, Foley attempts to push back by “stressing the implausibility of it,” a colleague of Foley’s will recall. But as Cheney and his aides keep pressing, Foley begins to give in. “He was bullied and intimidated,” one of his friends will recall. The pressure on Foley and other analysts is both relentless and hostile. One retired CIA analyst close to current analysts will recall: “It was done along the lines of: ‘What’s wrong with you bunch of assh_les? You don’t know what’s going on, you’re horribly biased, you’re a bunch of pinkos.’” A current analyst later explains, “It gets to the point where you just don’t want to fight it anymore.” [New Republic, 11/20/2003]

Vice President Cheney, widely acknowledged as a master bureaucrat, uses a variety of bureaucratic strategies to craft his own foreign policy strategies, including the promotion the Office of Special Plans (OSP—see September 2002), simultaneously undercutting and marginalizing the CIA. Many senior intelligence officials have no idea that the OSP even exists. “I didn’t know about its existence,” Greg Thielmann, the director of the State Department’s in-house intelligence agency, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), will say. Strategic Placement of Personal, Ideological Allies - Another Cheney strategy is personal placement. He moves his special adviser, neoconservative William Luti, into the OSP. Another influential neoconservative, Abram Shulsky, soon joins Luti there. A longtime associate of both Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Stephen Cambone, becomes a special assistant to Rumsfeld (see Early 2001). Cheney now has his allies at the highest levels of the Pentagon. In Cheney’s office, chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby serves as his liaison with the Pentagon. His chief counsel, David Addington, oversees Cheney’s aggressive and obsessively secretive legal staff. In the National Security Council (NSC), Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice’s deputy, keeps a close eye on Rice in case she shows signs of falling back in with her old mentor, Brent Scowcroft (see August 1998). John Bolton and David Wurmser keep tabs on Colin Powell at the State Department. Cheney has John Yoo (see (After 10:00 a.m.) September 11, 2001) at the Justice Department. Not only does Cheney have highly placed loyalists in the State, Defense, and Justice Department, and in the NSC, he has vital allies in the Republican leadership in Congress. Managing the Oval Office - Cheney handles the Oval Office himself. A Pentagon official who works closely with Cheney will later observe that President Bush handles the executive branch much as he handled the Texas Rangers baseball team: ignoring much of the daily functions, leaving most policy decisions to others and serving as a “corporate master of ceremonies, attending to the morale of the management team and focusing on narrow issues… that interested him.” Cheney becomes, in author Craig Unger’s words, “the sole framer of key issues for Bush,” the single conduit through which information reaches the president. Cheney, the Pentagon official will later say, “rendered the policy planning, development and implementation functions of the interagency system essentially irrelevant. He has, in matters he has deemed important, governed. As a matter of protocol, good manners, and constitutional deference, he has obtained the requisite ‘check-mark’ of the president, often during one-on-one meetings after a Potemkin ‘interagency process’ had run its often inconclusive course.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 249-250]

The Bush administration submits to Congress a 31-page document entitled “The National Security Strategy of the United States.” Preemptive War - The National Security Strategy (NSS) openly advocates the necessity for the US to engage in “preemptive war” against nations it believes are likely to become a threat to the US’s security. It declares: “In an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world’s most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle. The United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.” The declaration that the US will engage in preemptive war with other nations reverses decades of American military and foreign policy stances; until now, the US has held that it would only launch an attack against another nation if it had been attacked first, or if American lives were in imminent danger. President Bush had first mentioned the new policy in a speech in June 2002 (see June 1, 2002), and it echoes policies proposed by Paul Wolfowitz during the George H. W. Bush administration (see March 8, 1992). [Shenon, 2008, pp. 128]US Must Maintain Military 'Beyond Challenge' - The National Security Strategy states that the ultimate objective of US national security policy is to “dissuade future military competition.” The US must therefore “build and maintain our defenses beyond challenge. Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” [London Times, 9/21/2002]Ignoring the International Criminal Court - The NSS also states, “We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept.” [US President, 9/2002]Declaring War on Terrorism Itself - It states: “The enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism—premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents.” Journalism professor Mark Danner will later comment in the New York Times: “Not Islamic terrorism or Middle Eastern terrorism or even terrorism directed against the United States: terrorism itself. ‘Declaring war on “terror,”’ as one military strategist later remarked to me, ‘is like declaring war on air power.’” [New York Times Magazine, 9/11/2005]Fundamental Reversal of Containment, Deterrence Principles - Washington Post reporter Tim Reich later describes the NSS as “revers[ing] the fundamental principles that have guided successive presidents for more than 50 years: containment and deterrence.” Foreign policy professor Andrew Bacevich will write that the NSS is a “fusion of breathtaking utopianism [and] barely disguised machtpolitik.” Bacevich continues, “It reads as if it were the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke.” [American Conservative, 3/24/2003]Written by Future Executive Director of 9/11 Commission - The document is released under George W. Bush’s signature, but was written by Philip D. Zelikow, formerly a member of the previous Bush administration’s National Security Council, and currently a history professor at the University of Virginia and a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Zelikow produced the document at the behest of his longtime colleague National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (see June 1, 2002). His authorship of the document will not be revealed until well after he is appointed executive director of the 9/11 commission (see Mid-December 2002-March 2003). Many on the Commission will consider Zelikow’s authorship of the document a prima facie conflict of interest, and fear that Zelikow’s position on the Commission will be used to further the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive war (see March 21, 2004). [US Department of State, 8/5/2005; Shenon, 2008, pp. 128]

State Department officials, led by Undersecretary of State Jim Kelly, fly to Pyongyang, North Korea, and confront Kim Jong Il’s foreign ministry with evidence that North Korea is working on centrifuges for processing enriched uranium—a necessity for the production of nuclear weapons. The State officials are surprised when the North Koreans admit to owning such centrifuges. The new threat is not particularly imminent, as it takes years to process the amount of uranium needed for even a single atomic bomb, but the US officials are unsettled by the North Koreans’ ready admission. The North Koreans also have a supply of radioactive fuel rods from their nuclear power plant in Yongbyon; these rods could be processed into plutonium and then into atomic bombs in a matter of months. Under the so-called “Agreed Framework” (see October 21, 1994), an agreement brokered by the Clinton administration and negotiated by former President Jimmy Carter, those fuel rods are locked in a storage facility and monitored by international weapons inspectors. Unfortunately, after the US and North Korea match each other in threats and belligerence, North Korea will throw out the weapons inspectors, open the storage facility, and begin reprocessing them into bomb-grade plutonium. Instead of careful negotiations and diplomacy, the US in essence goads the volatile North Koreans into breaking the agreement and restarting their nuclear weapons program (see October 27, 2002). [Washington Monthly, 5/2004] One administration official will later call the negotiating tactics “no carrot, no stick, and no talk.” Author J. Peter Scoblic will later term the negotiating failure “catastrophic,” noting that by 2006 the North Koreans will not only have produced enough plutonium for 10 nuclear weapons, they will have tested one. Scoblic will write: “Often frustrated by their failures, their inability to rid the world of evil (see December 19, 2003), Bush officials assuaged their moral sensibilities by ‘calling evil by its name.’ Conservatives, who were fond of deriding treaties as mere pieces of paper, had actually opted for an even less forceful alternative: taunting.” [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 234]

Influential evangelist and political activist Jerry Falwell calls the Prophet Muhammed, the founder of Islam, a “terrorist,” telling a CBS News interviewer: “I think Muhammad was a terrorist. I read enough of the history of his life written by both Muslims and non-Muslims [to know] that he was a—a violent man, a man of war.” In contrast, Falwell says: “Jesus set the example for love, as did Moses. I think Muhammad set an opposite example.” After a global eruption of outrage at Falwell’s statements, he issues a backhanded apology: “I sincerely apologize that certain statements of mine made during an interview for CBS’s 60 Minutes were hurtful to the feelings of many Muslims. I intended no disrespect to any sincere, law-abiding Muslim.” His denunciation of Muhammed came as an answer to what he calls a “controversial and loaded question” at the end of an hour-long interview. The backlash from Falwell’s remarks is severe. At least five people are killed and around 50 injured when Hindu-Muslim rioting over the remarks breaks out in India. Shi’ite Muslim clerics in Lebanon and Iran express their outrage over Falwell’s remarks, with one Iranian cleric saying that Falwell is a “mercenary and must be killed.” Since Falwell’s remarks, hundreds of Muslim protesters will twice gather outside the CBS building in New York City to demand an apology from the network. [CBS News, 10/14/2002] Falwell’s remarks echo earlier denunciations of Islam by other American Christian evangelicals (see October 2001 and June 10-11, 2002).

The US announces that North Korea has admitted to having a secret nuclear arms program during arms negotiations (see October 4, 2002). Initially, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il says he will allow United Nations weapons inspectors to look over his nation’s nuclear facilities, but that offer will not last. [BBC, 12/2007]

The Bush administration publicly reveals that North Korea has centrifuges needed to produce weapons-grade uranium (see October 4, 2002). The administration has kept this information secret for two weeks, waiting for Congress to pass its resolution authorizing military action against Iraq (see October 10, 2002) before releasing it to the public. Foreign affairs journalist Fred Kaplan will later write: “The public rationale for war was that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. If it was known that North Korea was also making WMDs—and nuclear weapons, at that—it would have muddied the debate over Iraq. Some would have wondered whether Iraq was the more compelling danger—or asked why Bush saw a need for war against Iraq but not against North Korea.” Three days later, Bush announces that the US is unilaterally withdrawing from the “Agreed Framework” treaty between the US and North Korea that keeps North Korea from producing nuclear weapons (see October 21, 1994 and October 27, 2002). [Washington Monthly, 5/2004]

Responding to North Korea’s admission that it has the centrifuges necessary to produce weapons-grade uranium (see October 4, 2002 and October 17, 2002), President Bush announces that the US is unilaterally withdrawing from the 1994 “Agreed Framework” treaty between the US and North Korea that keeps North Korea from producing nuclear weapons (see October 21, 1994). It halts oil supplies to North Korea and urges other countries to cut off all economic relations with that country. In return, the North goes back and forth, at one turn defending its right to develop nuclear weapons, and in another offering to halt its nuclear program in return for US aid and the signing of a US non-aggression pact. North Korea asserts that the US has not met its obligations under the Agreed Framework (see October 21, 1994), as the construction of light-water nuclear reactors, scheduled to be completed in 2003, is years behind schedule. [Washington Monthly, 5/2004; BBC, 12/2007]

The North Korean Central News Agency, a government-run media outlet, announces that if the US is ready to conclude a peace treaty with North Korea, then it “will be ready to clear the US of its security concerns.” North Korea is implying that it will cease developing nuclear weapons. But the Bush administration has no interest in establishing peaceful relations with North Korea (see November 2002). [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 239] The US chief arms negotiator for North Korea, Jim Kelly, is asked if the administration might ask the United Nations Security Council to intervene. According to a diplomat present for the exchange, Kelly replies, “The Security Council is for Iraq.” Kelly will later claim not to recall making the statement. [Washington Post, 10/26/2004]

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il sends a letter to President Bush saying, “If the United States recognizes our sovreignty and assures non-aggression, it is our view that we should be able to find a way to resolve the nuclear issue in compliance with the demands of a new century.” The Bush administration has already ignored one recent proffer from North Korea (see October 27, 2002); it responds to this one by cutting off the monthly shipments of heavy fuel oil as mandated by the Agreed Framework (see October 21, 1994). In turn, North Korea declares the Agreed Framework dead. [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 239]

National Security Council official Flynt Leverett, the head of Mideast affairs and the prime proponent of a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians in that organization (see December 2001-January 2002 and April 2002), confronts his boss, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, over the Bush administration’s continued lack of progress on such negotiations, and over its repeated broken promises to Arab heads of state (see Spring 2002 and Summer 2002). Leverett has fielded a furious phone call from Jordan’s Foreign Minister, Marwan Muasher, who has just been told by Rice that all negotiations over the so-called “road map to peace” are at an end. “Do you have any idea how this has pulled the rug out from under us, from under me?” Muasher demanded. “I’m the one that has to go into Arab League meetings and get beat up and say, ‘No, there’s going to be a plan out by the end of the year.’ How can we ever trust you again?” Leverett demands an explanation from Rice. She tells him that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has called for early elections, and he asked President Bush to put all negotiations on hold until after the elections. Leverett, unable to swallow his indignation any longer, retorts: “You told the whole world you were going to put this out before Christmas. Because one Israeli politician told you it’s going to make things politically difficult for him, you don’t put it out? Do you realize how hard that makes things for all our Arab partners?” Rice remains impassive. “If we put the road map out,” she says, “it will interfere with Israeli elections.” Leverett replies, “You are interfering with Israeli elections, just in another way.” Rice concludes the discussion, “Flynt, the decision has already been made.” Leverett, disgusted with the lack of sincerity towards the negotiations and with the impending Iraq invasion, will quit the NSC in March 2003. [Esquire, 10/18/2007]

The US is outraged to learn that North Korean-made Scud ballistic missiles are found aboard a ship bound for Yemen. The US initially detains the ship, but is later forced to release it and concede that neither North Korea nor Yemen had broken any laws. [BBC, 12/2007]

North Korea, stung by repeated rebuffs towards its attempts to reopen diplomatic negotiations with the US (see October 27, 2002 and November 2002), announces that it will restart its nuclear facilities. [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 239] It blames the US for ignoring its responsibilities under the 1994 Agreed Framework (see October 21, 1994). In the next few days and weeks, North Korea will ask the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to remove its seals and surveillance equipment from the Yongbyon nuclear facility, will itself begin removing monitoring equipment, and will begin shipping fuel rods to the Yongbyon plant to begin creating plutonium (see January 10, 2003 and After). [BBC, 12/2007]

The UN General Assembly approves the Optional Protocol to the Convention on Torture after 10 years of negotiations. The protocol is adopted with 127 votes in favor, 4 against, and 42 abstentions. The four states that oppose the treaty are the US, Nigeria, the Marshall Islands, and Palau. [Truthout (.org), 6/9/2004] One of the states voting in favor, Israel, later notifies the UN that its vote was cast by mistake because of a “human technical error.” [Ha'aretz, 6/3/2004] The purpose of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on Torture is to strengthen the means of enforcing the Convention’s provisions. Under the new protocol, a system of regular visits to prison facilities will be established. A 10-member subcommittee, funded by the UN, will serve as the executive arm of the existing committee on torture. [Ha'aretz, 6/3/2004]

North Korea expels the two international nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from its country (see December 12, 2002). IAEA officials have been monitoring North Korea’s nuclear program since 1985. [BBC, 12/2007; Scoblic, 2008, pp. 239]

The United States exports arms to 25 countries this year. Of these, 18 are involved in ongoing conflicts, including Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, Colombia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Israel. Sales to these countries total almost $1 billion, with most it—$845.6 million—going to Israel. More than half of the top 25 recipients are currently designated “undemocratic” by the US State Department’s Human Rights Report. Those countries—including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan—account for more than $2.7 billion in US sales. When countries with a poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse are also added to the list, 20 of the top 25 US arms recipients, or 80 percent, are either undemocratic regimes or governments with a poor human rights record. [Berrigan and Hartung, 6/2005; Boston Globe, 11/13/2006]

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) passes a resolution demanding that North Korea once again admit UN weapons inspectors (see December 31, 2002) and abandon its formerly secret nuclear weapons program (see December 12, 2002) “within weeks,” or face possible action by the UN Security Council. North Korea will not respond to this resolution. [BBC, 12/2007]

The US says it is “willing to talk to North Korea about living up to its obligations to the international community” regarding its restarted nuclear program (see December 12, 2002), but adds that it “will not provide quid pro quos to North Korea to live up to its existing obligations.” [BBC, 12/2007]

North Korea announces that it is withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (see December 12, 1985). Since its attempts to reopen diplomatic talks with the US were rejected (see October 27, 2002 and November 2002), it has announced its restarting of its nuclear energy program (see December 12, 2002) and expelled international inspectors (see December 31, 2002). Around this same time, it begins removing some 8,000 spent fuel rods from storage, a direct indication that it intends to restart its nuclear weapons program. This is a burgeoning crisis for the world, as North Korea is, in many experts’ view, the definition of a “rogue nation,” but the Bush administration refuses to recognize it as a crisis. In 2008, author J. Peter Scoblic will write, “President Bush, focused on Iraq, refused to label it as such.” North Korea has enough nuclear material to make six to eight nuclear weapons; some experts believe it already has one or two. With the inspectors gone, the world has no way to know what North Korea is doing with its spent fuel rods, or where they are being stored—removing the possibility that the US could destroy them with a targeted air strike. Bush’s response to the North Korean crisis is contradictory. While labeling it a member of the “axis of evil” (see January 29, 2002), and sometimes acting belligerently towards that nation (see March 2003-May 2003), he also insists that the US will not use military force to restrain North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Diplomacy is the answer to the crisis, Bush says, but his administration refuses to talk to the North Koreans (see November 2002) until later in the month (see Mid-January 2003). [BBC, 12/2007; Scoblic, 2008, pp. 239-240, 242]

Global Strike logo. [Source: Federation of American Scientists]President Bush signs a classified presidential directive that defines the “Global Strike” program, formalized as Contingency Plan 8022, or CONPLAN-8022, as US policy. Global Strike implements nuclear weapons as part of a possible US preemptive strike against envisioned enemies. In the order, Bush defines Global Strike as “a capability to deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and national objectives.” He orders that Global Strike be turned over to the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), the entity in charge of deploying and using the nation’s nuclear arsenal, telling it to “be ready to strike at any moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world.” A month later, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will tell the House Armed Services Committee, “With its Global Strike responsibilities, the Command will provide a core cadre to plan and execute nuclear, conventional, and information operations anywhere in the world.” [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 179-180] The plan is not revealed until May 2005, when defense analyst William Arkin writes of the program for the Washington Post. [Washington Post, 5/15/2005] In 2008, author J. Peter Scoblic will write: “Global Strike represented the next—some might say the ultimate—manifestation of this principle [domination and isolationism], allowing for the possibility of purely unilateral military action. There was no need for allies and no need for nation building. Just as missile defense could protect us from having to engage the world, so Global Strike could allow the United States to dominate the world while standing utterly apart from it.” [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 183]

The Bush administration responds to the North Korean nuclear crisis (see January 10, 2003 and After) by saying that it will talk—but not negotiate—with the North Koreans. In 2008, author J. Peter Scoblic will write, “The Bush administration would, in other words, be willing to tell North Korea that it had transgressed, but it would not bargain.” North Korea insists on bilateral talks with the US, but Bush officials refuse (see February 4, 2003). [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 240]

North Korea, responding to President Bush’s remark in his State of the Union address that its government is “an oppressive regime [whose] people live in fear and starvation,” calls Bush a “shameless charlatan” and accuses his speech of being an “undisguised declaration of aggression to topple the [North Korean] system.” [BBC, 12/2007]

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage tells Congress that the Bush administration will engage in diplomatic negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear ambitions (see Mid-January 2003). “Of course we’re going to have direct talks with the North Koreans,” he says, the only question is when and how. President Bush repudiates Armitage’s statement, reportedly becoming so furious that he bans his staff from discussing the entire subject of bilateral talks in public. The administration’s policy continues to be a direct refusal to talk to North Korea. Its explanation: the Clinton administration had negotiated the Agreed Framework with the North Koreans (see October 21, 1994), and that agreement had failed. The Framework had actually been negotiated through the efforts of South Korea and Japan along with the US, and for almost nine years has succeeded in stopping North Korea’s plutonium weapons program from developing, the entire point of the agreement (see December 12, 2002). However, a North Korean uranium bomb project is progressing (see June 2002). In 2008, author J. Peter Scoblic will write: “[T]he administration’s disinclination to engage in bilateral talks seemed more morally than tactically motivated. Conservatives within the administration had realized that, while they could not stop any and all talks with the North, they could prevent bilateral talks and, just as important, they could restrict the latitude given to American negotiators—again, much as [neoconservative defense official Richard] Perle had done during the Reagan administration (see September 1981 through November 1983 and October 11-12, 1986)—so that little or no progress would be made.” [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 240]

The governments of Israel and the United States are in almost-perfect accord on most issues, according to a Washington Post analysis. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has talked repeatedly of the “special closeness” he has to the Bush administration, and of the “deep understanding” that President Bush and his officials have for Israel’s security and foreign policy needs. He has thanked Bush for providing what he calls “the required leeway in our ongoing war on terrorism” and lauded the Bush administration’s efforts to promote a peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinian people. Thomas Neumann, who heads the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), agrees. “This is the best administration for Israel since Harry Truman,” says Neumann, equating Bush with the first American president to recognize the independent state of Israel. A senior official in the first Bush administration says that Sharon used the 9/11 attacks to cement the bond between his government and the Bush administration. One senior administration official says: “Sharon played the president like a violin: ‘I’m fighting your war, terrorism is terrorism,’ and so on. Sharon did a masterful job.” Accord with Likud - But the US is not just in accord with Israel; it is in accord with Likud, the hardline conservative political party currently in charge of the Israeli government. The Post writes: “For the first time, a US administration and a Likud government in Israel are pursuing nearly identical policies. Earlier US administrations, from Jimmy Carter’s through Bill Clinton’s, held Likud and Sharon at arm’s length, distancing the United States from Likud’s traditionally tough approach to the Palestinians. But today, as Neumann noted, Israel and the United States share a common view on terrorism, peace with the Palestinians, war with Iraq and more. Neumann and others said this change was made possible by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and their aftermath.” Bush supporters, particularly evangelical Christians, are “delight[ed]” with the administration’s overt support of Likud policies. Abandoning Peace Talks between Israel and Palestinians - The downside, the Post notes, is that diplomacy with Israel’s Arab neighbors has come to a virtual standstill, and the Middle East “peace process” praised by Sharon is considered by many past and current US officials as a failure. Clinton administration National Security Adviser Sandy Berger says: “Every president since at least Nixon has seen the Arab-Israeli conflict as the central strategic issue in the Middle East. But this administration sees Iraq as the central challenge, and… has disengaged from any serious effort to confront the Arab-Israeli problem.” Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, the administration’s special envoy to the region, calls the peace process “quiescent,” and adds, “I’ve kind of gone dormant.” 'Likudniks Really in Charge Now' - Bush has appointed neoconservative Elliott Abrams, a vociferous critic of any peace agreement between Israel and Palestine, the head of Mideast affairs for the National Security Council, signaling his administration’s near-total alignment with Israel in the process. Abrams’s hardline views are supported by, among others, Vice President Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, Abrams’s mentor, who in 1996 recommended to Israel’s then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he abandon the Oslo peace accords and refuse to accede to Palestinian demands of “land for peace” (see September 13, 1993). A senior administration official says wryly, “The Likudniks are really in charge now,” using a Yiddish term for supporters of Sharon’s political party. “It’s a strong lineup,” says Neumann. Fellow neoconservative Meyrav Wurmser of the Hudson Institute says of Abrams: “Elliott’s appointment is a signal that the hard-liners in the administration are playing a more central role in shaping policy.… [T]he hard-liners are a very unique group. The hawks in the administration are in fact people who are the biggest advocates of democracy and freedom in the Middle East.” The Post explains that in Abrams’s and Wurmser’s view, promoting democracy in the Middle East is the best way to assure Israel’s security. Like other neoconservatives, they see the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of a “democratic Palestine” as necessary for peace in the region. Others who disagree with the neoconservatives call them a “cabal.” The Post writes, “Members of the group do not hide their friendships and connections, or their loyalty to strong positions in support of Israel and Likud.” [Washington Post, 2/9/2003]

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) finds North Korea in material breach of mandated nuclear safeguards (see January 6, 2003) and refers the matter to the United Nations Security Council. The UNSC will not condemn North Korea for its actions. [BBC, 12/2007]

President Bush orders several attack planes, along with a number of B-1 and B-52 bombers, to the US Air Force base in Guam, as an implied threat against North Korea’s restarted nuclear program (see January 10, 2003 and After). Foreign affairs journalist Fred Kaplan will call the administration’s response “a feeble threat, a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horses escaped.” The fuel rods of such concern to the US (see October 4, 2002) are long hidden away from US satellites. Bush makes no further preparations for any sort of air strike against North Korea, nor does he make any diplomatic “carrot and stick” overtures to the North Koreans. After two months, Bush orders the aircraft back to their home bases. Why such a feeble response? Many believe that the answer lies in the administration’s focus on Iraq; in the words of one senior administration official, “President Bush does not want to distract international attention from Iraq.” In April, after the invasion of Iraq experiences initial success (see March 25, 2003), Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tells Bush that North Korea could also profit from an Iraq-style regime change; while Bush agrees, the administration takes no steps in that direction. Instead, Bush officials mount what is little more than a pretense of diplomatic negotiations (see April 2003). [Washington Monthly, 5/2004]

Brent Scowcroft, still a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board even though he is virtually frozen out of any administration dialogue concerning Iraq (see October 16, 2001 and March 2002), tells the National Journal: “During the campaign, [President Bush] made some strong statements about putting more stock in [coalitions]. Clearly, that hasn’t happened.” Ultimately, Scowcroft says: “such a ‘go it alone’ doctrine is fundamentally, fatally flawed.… [I]t’s already given us an image of arrogance and unilateralism, and we’re paying a very high price for that image. If we get to the point where everyone secretly hopes the United States gets a black eye because we’re so obnoxious, then we’ll be totally hamstrung in the war on terror. We’ll be like Gulliver with the Lilliputians.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 292]

The Bush administration opens brief, futile negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear program (see October 4, 2002 and January 10, 2003 and After). Chief negotiator Jim Kelly goes to Beijing to prepare for multilateral talks with North Korea, Japan, China, and South Korea. However, Kelly is crippled by specific instructions on how to deal with the North Koreans. He is not even allowed to speak with the North Korean delegates unless the other countries’ delegates are also present. During the negotiations, North Korea’s deputy foreign minister Li Gun, an experienced negotiator, says that his country now has nuclear weapons—calling them a “deterrent”—and says the weapons will not be given up unless the US drops its “hostile attitude” (see March 2003-May 2003) towards the regime. Stripping away the rhetoric, the North Koreans are offering to disarm if the US will sign a non-aggression pact. Kelly returns to Washington and announces a “bold, new proposal” from the North Koreans. But President Bush dismisses the proposal, expressing his feelings in his words to a reporter: “They’re back to the old blackmail game.” Foreign affairs journalist Fred Kaplan will later write, “This was the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld line: As long as the North Koreans were pursuing nuclear weapons, even to sit down with them would be ‘appeasement,’ succumbing to ‘blackmail,’ and ‘rewarding bad behavior.’” [Washington Monthly, 5/2004] Bush administration officials refuse to discuss any specifics until North Korea agrees to scrap its nuclear program. They also refuse to talk directly with the North Korean officials, instead insisting that the Chinese delegation pass along their demands. Not surprisingly, the North Koreans walk out of the meeting. [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 240-241]

The US ambassador to the UN, neoconservative John Bolton, reassures Israeli government officials that after invading Iraq, the US intends to, in author Craig Unger’s words, “take care of Iran, Syria, and North Korea.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 290]

Senior Bush administration officials say that their private hope for curtailing North Korea’s “rogue” nuclear weapons program (see January 10, 2003 and After, February 4, 2003, and August 2003) is for regime change—for the dictatorship of Kim Jong Il to fall. One official says the best way to deal with North Korea is to, in essence, use economic and diplomatic embargoes to “starve” the Kim regime. Providing Kim’s government with food and oil, even in return for nuclear concessions, is “morally repugnant,” the official says, and he does not believe North Korea will willingly give up its nuclear weapons anyway (see October 27, 2002 and November 2002). “If we could have containment that’s tailored to the conditions of North Korea, and not continue to throw it lifelines like we have in the past, I think it goes away,” the official says. “It’s a bankrupt economy. I can’t imagine that the regime has any popular support. How long it takes, I don’t know. It could take two years.” (Numerous Bush officials such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld’s deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and State Department official John Bolton have all said publicly that North Korea’s regime is bound to collapse sooner or later.) When asked what the North Koreans will do during that transition period, the Bush official replies: “I think it’ll crank out, you know, half a dozen weapons a year or more. We lived with a Soviet Union that had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, including thousands of them pointed at us. We just have to cope.” Asian and American nuclear experts are horrified by the Bush administration view. As New York Times columnist Bill Keller notes, the argument “has some rather serious holes. First, North Korea, unlike the Soviet Union, will sell anything to anybody for the right price. Second, a collapsing North Korea with nukes may not be as pretty a picture as my official informant anticipates. Third, if this collapse means a merger of the peninsula into a single, unified Korea—that is, if South Korea becomes a de facto nuclear power—that will bring little joy to Japan or China.” Another Bush official says that if North Korea shows signs of expanding its nuclear arsenal, a military strike to eliminate that threat would be considered. “The only acceptable end state [is] everything out,” he says. To tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea would send a message to Iran (see February 9, 2003) and other nations: “Get your nuclear weapons quickly, before the Americans do to you what they’ve done to Iraq, because North Korea shows once you get the weapons, you’re immune.” [New York Times, 5/4/2003; Scoblic, 2008, pp. 241]

North Korea announces that it is withdrawing from a 1992 agreement with South Korea to keep the Korean peninsula free from nuclear weapons. It is Pyongyang’s last remaining international nuclear nonproliferation agreement. [BBC, 12/2007]

A visiting delegation of US congressmen led by Representative Curt Weldon (R-PA) tells reporters that North Korea officials admit to having nuclear weapons, and have “just about completed” reprocessing some 8,000 spent fuel rods into plutonium, allowing them to build more. [BBC, 12/2007]

Three key intelligence advisers are forced to resign, or fired, by neoconservative Elliott Abrams, the National Security Council (NSC)‘s presidential adviser on the Middle East (see December 2002 and December 2002). Flynt Leverett was the senior director for Middle East affairs on the NSC; Hillary Mann was a foreign service officer on detail to the NSC as its director for Iran and Persian Gulf affairs; and Ben Miller was a CIA staffer and an NSC expert on Iran. All three are forced out because they disagree with Abrams’s views towards Israel. Miller also questioned Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi’s fitness to become the new leader of Iraq. Leverett will later say: “There was a decision made… basically to renege on the commitments we had made to various European and Arab partners of the United States [in favor of Israel]. I personally disagreed with that decision.” According to Yossef Bodansky, the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terror and Unconventional Warfare, Abrams “led Miller to an open window and told him to jump.” Bodansky will also confirm that Mann and Leverett are ordered to leave the NSC by Abrams. [Unger, 2007, pp. 291]

A group including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger issues a report entitled “An American Security Policy.” The report, commissioned by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), lists six areas of security concerns ranked in their order of importance. Leading the field is the section called “The Loose Nukes Crisis in North Korea.” The second most pressing concern, the report says, is the unsecured nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in Russia and the former Soviet states. Iraq is ranked fourth. [Carter, 2004, pp. 19]

The US takes part in another round of multilateral negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program (see April 2003). The US has failed to destabilize the North Korean government, and the North Koreans have been unsuccessful in luring the US into bilateral talks. Instead, both sides agree to “six-way” talks that include Japan, China, Russia, and South Korea. Heavy Restrictions on US Negotiators - US chief negotiator Jim Kelly is finally permitted to meet one-on-one with his North Korean counterpart Li Gun—for only 20 minutes, and only in the presence of the other delegates. This time, Kelly is allowed to chat briefly with Li in a corner. Kelly is also forbidden from making any offers or even suggesting the possibility of direct negotiations. Kelly’s fellow negotiator, Charles Pritchard, will later recall that Kelly was told to start the chat with Li by saying: “This is not a negotiating session. This is not an official meeting.” Foreign affairs journalist Fred Kaplan will later write: “For the previous year-and-a-half, the State Department had favored a diplomatic solution to the Korea crisis while the Pentagon and key players in the [National Security Council] opposed it. The August meeting in Beijing was Bush’s idea of a compromise—a middle path that constituted no path at all. He let Kelly talk, but didn’t let him say anything meaningful; he went to the table but put nothing on it.” But even this level of negotiation is too much for some administration hawks. During the meetings in Beijing, Undersecretary of State John Bolton gives a speech in Washington where he calls North Korea “a hellish nightmare” and Kim Jong Il “a tyrannical dictator.” Kaplan will observe, “True enough, but not the sort of invective that senior officials generally issue on the eve of a diplomatic session.” An exasperated Pritchard resigns in protest from the administration. He will later say: “My position was the State Department’s envoy for North Korean negotiations, yet we were prohibited from having negotiations. I asked myself, ‘What am I doing in government?’” Pritchard had also learned that White House and Pentagon officials did not want him involved in the talks, dismissing him as “the Clinton guy.” (Pritchard had helped successfully negotiate earlier agreements with the North Koreans during the Clinton administration.) [Washington Monthly, 5/2004] A Chinese diplomat says, “The American policy towards DRPK [North Korea]—this is the main problem we are facing.” [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 241]Cheney Source of Restrictions - According to Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, the restrictions on Kelly come directly from Vice President Cheney. “A script would be drafted for Jim, what he could say and what he could not say, with points elucidated in the margins,” Wilkerson will later explain. The process involves President Bush, Cheney, Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers. On at least two occasions, Cheney rewrites the script for Kelly without consulting with the other principals, even Bush. According to Wilkerson, Cheney “put handcuffs on our negotiator, so he could say little more than ‘welcome and good-bye.’” In the words of authors Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Cheney’s “negotiating position was that there would be no negotiations.” [Dubose and Bernstein, 2006, pp. 185-186]

Secretary of State Colin Powell sounds a note of disinterest when asked about the likelihood of a North Korean test of a nuclear weapon (see October 9, 2006). Powell tells reporters: “If they test we’ll take note of their test. The only reason they are testing is to scare the international community. The president has already accepted the possibility that they might test. And we will say ‘Gee, that was interesting.’” Powell adds: “The 50-year history of dealing with this regime is that they are marvelous in terms of threats, in terms of rhetoric and actions. Well, they might take an action, but this time they would be sticking their finger not just in the eye of the United States, but I think Kim Jong Il will have to think twice about whether he would do such a thing in light of Chinese involvement.” President Bush himself has answered a question about the likelihood of North Korea building as many as eight nuclear weapons by shrugging. In 2008, author J. Peter Scoblic will write that because of the complete failure of negotiations between the US and North Korea (see August 2003), “[t]he administration had little choice but to act as though nothing was wrong.” [Business Week, 9/22/2003; Scoblic, 2008, pp. 241]

In a speech, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski observes that in 1963, during the Cuban missile crisis between the US and the USSR, Secretary of State Dean Acheson offered to show French President Charles de Gaulle satellite photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba to support President Kennedy’s request for French support in case the US needed to go to war with the US. De Gaulle replied that he did not need to see the photos, that Kennedy’s word was good enough for him. In April 2004, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, reflecting on Brzezinski’s words and the raft of lies and misinformation that led the US to invade and occupy Iraq, will write, “Who would now ever take an American president at his word, in the way that de Gaulle once did?” [Wilson, 2004, pp. 426]

As part of the difficult negotiations between the US, North Korea, and four regional partners to try to bring the North Korean nuclear program under restraint (see August 2003), the Chinese delegation offered a joint statement that would show some progress, however limited, has been made. The US refuses to sign, balking at language that recognizes US-North Korean relations are founded on “the intention to coexist.” Vice President Dick Cheney explains the US rejection: “I have been charged by the president with making sure that none of the tyrannies of the world are negotiated with” (see December 19, 2003). [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 241]

Vice President Cheney, discussing the administration’s refusal to negotiate with North Korea, sums up its policy quite bluntly. “I have been charged by the president with making sure that none of the tyrannies in the world are negotiated with,” he says. “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.” Cheney is primarily responsible for rejecting a joint statement acknowledging North Korea’s right to exist as an independent nation, a precondition for North Korea to resume negotiations (see December 12, 2003). However, a Bush administration spokesman blames North Korea, not the US, for refusing to engage, and says the administration is willing to negotiate “without any preconditions.” Cheney insisted that North Korea agree to dismantle its nuclear program before any negotiations could begin. According to a senior Bush official, a North Korean negotiator has complained that the US demands are the equivalent of “you… telling me to take off all my clothes and walk out in a snowstorm and you promise you will come running with a coat. I don’t think so. You want me to go naked into the night.” [Knight Ridder, 12/19/2003; Scoblic, 2008, pp. 234]

Libya announces that it is giving up its unconventional weapons and ballistic missile programs in response to recent negotiations with the US and Britain. Thousands of nuclear reactor components are taken from a site in Tripoli and shipped to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Later examination shows that the Libyans had made little progress towards developing any sort of nuclear program. Nevertheless, it is a significant breakthrough in the Bush administration’s relations with Muslim nations considered to be inimical to Western interests. 'Scared Straight'? - Bush administration officials declare that the Libyan government “caved” under American pressure and because of the US-led invasion of Iraq; because Libyan leader Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi had approached the US shortly before the invasion of Iraq, it is plain that al-Qadhafi had been “scared straight” by the belligerent US approach to Middle Eastern affairs. In 2008, author J. Peter Scoblic will call that characterization “useful, if wishful.” The threat of a Libyan WMD program was sketchy at best, regardless of Bush officials’ insistence that the US had forced the disarmament of a dangerous foe. But, Scoblic will write, the Libyan agreement serves as “a retroactive justification of an invasion whose original rationale had become increasingly dubious.” The Libyan agreement also “seemed to prove that conservatives could solve rogue state problems in a morally pure but nonmilitary way—that they did not have to settle for containment or the distasteful quid pro quo that had characterized deals like Clinton’s 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea (see October 21, 1994). They could simply demand disarmament.” Negotiating Disarmament Since 1999 - The reality of the Libyan agreement is far different from the Bush interpretation. Al-Qadhafi’s government has for years wanted to get out from under UN sanctions imposed after Libyan hijackers bombed a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. Since 1999, the US and Britain have been negotiating with Libya, with the ultimate aim of lifting sanctions and normalizing relations. President Clinton’s chief negotiator, Martin Indyk, said that “Libya’s representatives were ready to put everything on the table” during that time. Bush officials, after an initial reluctance to resume negotiations, were reassured by Libya’s offer of support and assistance after the 9/11 attacks, and resumed discussions in October 2001. Al-Qadhafi himself offered to discuss disarmamement with the British in August 2002. Negotiations opened in October 2002. With the Iraq invasion looming, the Libyans held up further negotiations until March 2003; meanwhile, Vice President Cheney warned against striking any deals with the Libyans, saying that the US did not “want to reward bad behavior.” The negotiations resumed in March, with efforts made to deliberately keep State Department and Pentagon neoconservatives such as John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz in the dark “so that,” Scoblic will write, “administration conservatives could not sabotage a potential deal.” The negotiations were led by the CIA and MI6. (Bolton attempted to intervene in the negotiations, insisting that “regime change” in Libya was the US’s only negotiating plank, but high-level British officials had Bolton removed from the process and gave al-Qadhafi reassurances that Bolton’s stance was not reflective of either the US or Britain’s negotiating position.) Pretending that Libya 'Surrendered' - After the deal is struck, administration conservatives attempt to put a brave face on the deal, with Cheney saying: “President Bush does not deal in empty threats and half measures, and his determination has sent a clear message. Just five days after Saddam [Hussein] was captured (see December 14, 2003), the government of Libya agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program and turn the materials over to the United States.” Administration officials insist that there had been no negotiations whatsoever, and Libya had merely capitulated before the American display of military puissance. “It’s ‘engagement’ like we engaged the Japanese on the deck of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945,” one administration official boasts. “The only engagement with Libya was the terms of its surrender.” And Bush officials claim that the Libyans gave up their weapons with no terms whatsoever being granted them except for a promise “only that Libya’s good faith, if shown, would be reciprocated.” That is not true. Bush officials indeed made significant offers—that the US would not foment regime change in Libya, and that other “quid pro quo” terms would be observed. Thwarting Conservative Ideology - Scoblic will conclude: “Left unchecked, the administration’s ideological impulses would have scuttled the negotiations. In other words, for its Libya policy to bear fruit, the administration had to give up its notion that dealing with an evil regime was anathema; it had to accept coexistence even though al-Qadhafi continued to violate human rights. Libya is thus the exception that proves the rule.” [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 251-255]

A private delegation of US negotiators and arms experts flies to Pyongyang for a demonstration of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program (see October 4, 2002 and January 10, 2003 and After). They tour the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, and see actual plutonium. Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos nuclear lab and one of the delegates, comes back to Washington convinced that North Korea has indeed processed all of its fuel rods. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he tells the senators that while he saw no sign of actual weapons, that does not mean they do not have weapons, just that he was shown no evidence of such weapons. [Washington Monthly, 5/2004; BBC, 12/2007]

The Washington Times reports that an unpublished report by defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton concludes that China is expanding its military and is “building strategic relationships” along sea lanes from the Middle East to Southern China” in ways that suggest defensive and offensive positioning to protect China’s energy interests, but also to serve broad security objectives.” The paper, titled “Energy Futures in Asia,” was commissioned by Donald Rumsfeld. China intends to protect the sea lanes militarily, by strengthening its navy and developing undersea mines and a missile system. The report warns that these capabilities could be used “to deter the potential disruption of its energy supplies from potential threats, including the US Navy, especially in the case of a conflict with Taiwan.” Beijing is also developing strategic alliances with the states along the sea lanes in an effort to increase its influence in the region. [Washington Times, 1/18/2005]Pakistan - Beijing is constructing a naval base at the Pakistani port of Gwadar and setting up electronic eavesdropping posts in the city which will monitor ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and the Arabian Sea. [Washington Times, 1/18/2005]Bangladesh - China is developing closer ties to Bangladesh and building a container port facility at the city of Chittagong. [Washington Times, 1/18/2005]Burma (Myanmar) - China has established close relations with the military regime of Burma. It has provided Burma with “billions of dollars in military assistance to support a de facto military alliance,” is building naval bases there, and has already positioned electronic intelligence gathering facilities on islands in the Bay of Bengal and near the Strait of Malacca. Burma’s location is of strategic importance to Beijing because of its close proximity to the Strait of Malacca, through which 80 percent of China’s imported oil is shipped. [Washington Times, 1/18/2005]Cambodia - In November 2003, China agreed to provide training and equipment to Cambodia’s military. China and Cambodia are engaged in a joint effort to build a railway from southern China to the sea. [Washington Times, 1/18/2005]Thailand - China may fund a $20 billion canal that would cut across the Kra Isthmus and allow ships to bypass the Strait of Malacca. [Washington Times, 1/18/2005]

The General Accounting Office (GAO) reports on an array of problems with the military’s missile defense system (see March 23, 1983 and January 29, 1991). Its report includes an unclassified list of 50 recommendations for improving the system that originated in a public report produced by the Pentagon in 2000. Instead of acting on the recommendations, the Pentagon declares the list of recommendations “retroactively classified,” thereby forbidding Congressional members from discussing the recommendations in public. House members Henry Waxman (D-CA) and John Tierney (D-MA), who requested the GAO report, send an angry letter to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld calling the decision to classify the recommendations “highly dubious” and “an attempt to stymie public debate through the use of the classification system.” Rumsfeld ignores the protest. [Savage, 2007, pp. 103-104]

Vice President Dick Cheney travels to Asia to talk with US allies about dealing with North Korea’s nuclear program. Cheney reiterates the same position the US has had for years: the allies must join together in isolating North Korea and force “regime change” in that nation. The allies Cheney visits—South Korea, Japan, and China—have no interest in such a policy. They fear the possible consequences, be they a sudden onslaught of refugees, a power vacuum, or retaliatory strikes by Kim Jong Il in his last chaotic days in control of North Korea. Instead, China has opened up its own negotiations with North Korea, trying on its own to defuse the issue and calm Kim down. Meanwhile, North Korea says it has successfully solved all of the technical problems standing in the way of it producing nuclear weapons. No one knows precisely what, if any, nuclear weapons North Korea has, or what it is capable of producing (see January 10-22, 2004). [Washington Monthly, 5/2004]

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) investigates claims that North Korea secretly sent uranium to Libya when Tripoli was trying to develop nuclear weapons (see December 19, 2003 and After). [BBC, 12/2007]

Former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Patrick Lang writes that, in his opinion, a “small group of people who think they are the ‘bearers’ of a uniquely correct view of the world… sought to dominate the foreign policy of the United States in the Bush 43 administration, and succeeded in doing so through a practice of excluding all who disagreed with them. Those they could not drive from government they bullied and undermined until they, too, had drunk from the vat.” (Lang correlates the phrase “drunk from the vat” with the common metaphor of “drinking the Kool-Aid,” a particularly nasty turn of phrase sourced from the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana. The phrase now means, Lang explains, “that the person in question has given up personal integrity and has succumbed to the prevailing group-think that typifies policymaking today.”) The result is the war in Iraq, Lang argues, with steadily rising body counts and no clear end in sight. 'Walking Dead' Waiting for Retirement - Lang notes that senior military officers have said that the war’s senior strategist, General Tommy Franks, “had drunk the Kool-Aid,” and many intelligence officers have told Lang that “they too drank the Kool-Aid and as a result consider themselves to be among the ‘walking dead,’ waiting only for retirement and praying for an early release that will allow them to go away and try to forget their dishonor and the damage they have done to the intelligence services and therefore to the republic.” Lang writes that the US intelligence community has been deeply corrupted, bent on serving “specific group goals, ends, and beliefs held to the point of religious faith” and no longer fulfilling its core mission of “describing reality. The policy staffs and politicals in the government have the task of creating a new reality, more to their taste.… Without objective facts, decisions are based on subjective drivel. Wars result from such drivel. We are in the midst of one at present.” Shutting out Regional Experts - There is little place in Bush administration policy discussions for real experts on the Middle East, Lang writes: “The Pentagon civilian bureaucracy of the Bush administration, dominated by an inner circle of think-tankers, lawyers, and former Senate staffers, virtually hung out a sign, ‘Arabic Speakers Need Not Apply.’ They effectively purged the process of Americans who might have inadvertently developed sympathies for the people of the region. Instead of including such veterans in the planning process, the Bush team opted for amateurs brought in from outside the executive branch who tended to share the views of many of President Bush’s earliest foreign policy advisors and mentors. Because of this hiring bias, the American people got a Middle East planning process dominated by ‘insider’ discourse among longtime colleagues and old friends who ate, drank, talked, worked, and planned only with each other. Most of these people already shared attitudes and concepts of how the Middle East should be handled. Their continued association only reinforced their common beliefs.” The Bush administration does not countenance dissent or open exchange and discussion of opposing beliefs. The Bush policymakers behave, Lang writes, as if they have seized power in a ‘silent coup,’ treating outsiders as political enemies and refusing to hear anything except discussion of their own narrow, mutually shared beliefs. Using INC Information - Beginning in January 2001, the Bush administration began relying heavily on dubious intelligence provided by Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC—see January 30, 2001). The INC began receiving State Department funds in what some White House officials called the “Information Collection Program.” While the US intelligence community had little use for Chalabi, considering him an unreliable fabricator (see 1992-1996), he had close ties with many in the administration, particularly in the office of the vice president and in the senior civilian leadership of the Pentagon (see 1960s, 1985, and 1990-1991). Lang writes that while the INC excelled in providing Iraqi defectors with lurid, usually false tales, “what the program really did was to provide a steady stream of raw information useful in challenging the collective wisdom of the intelligence community where the ‘War with Iraq’ enthusiasts disagreed with the intelligence agencies.” The office of the vice president created what Lang calls “its own intelligence office, buried in the recesses of the Pentagon, to ‘stovepipe’ raw data to the White House, to make the case for war on the basis of the testimony of self-interested emigres and exiles” (see August 2002). From working as the DIA’s senior officer for the Middle East during the 1991 Gulf War and after, Lang knows from personal experience that many neoconservative White House officials believe, as does Vice President Cheney, that it was a mistake for the US to have refrained from occupying Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein in 1991 (see August 1992). Lang calls some of these officials “deeply embittered” and ready to rectify what they perceive as a grave error. [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004]

The Bush administration, pressured by increasingly harsh condemnations from the presidential campaign of Democrat John Kerry, grudgingly agrees to consider opening bilateral talks with North Korea over that country’s restarted nuclear program. Previously, the US had been one of six nations involved in such negotiations, which have gone nowhere in large part due to US intransigence (see August 2003). The Bush administration has also insisted on the importance of Chinese involvement in the talks, which serves to raise China’s profile in the region and lower the US’s. Bush officials offer North Korea a deal in which that nation would provide an accounting of all its nuclear facilities; in return the US would broker a resumption of fuel oil shipments to the North by South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia, and would consider drafting security assurances (see December 12, 2003) and lifting economic sanctions. Instead of accepting, North Korea chooses to wait and see if Kerry can oust President Bush from the White House. [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 242]

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan urges the Security Council to vote against a resolution that would exempt US soldiers serving in UN approved operations from prosecution before the International Criminal Court (ICC). Talking to journalists, he says, “For the past two years, I have spoken quite strongly against the exemption, and I think it would be unfortunate for one to press for such an exemption, given the prisoner abuse in Iraq.”
[Inter Press Service, 6/21/2004] He adds, “It would discredit the Council and the United Nations that stands for the rule of law and the primacy of the rule of law.”
[Truthout (.org), 6/28/2004] Since President Bush has taken office, the US, by threatening to withdraw funding for UN peacekeeping missions (see July 12, 2002), has made the Security Council adopt a resolution each year prohibiting the ICC from investigating or prosecuting officials from states that have not ratified the Rome Statute, like the US, for acts committed during participation in a UN-authorized mission. “Given the recent revelations from Abu Ghraib prison,” said Richard Dicker from Human Rights Watch, “the US government has picked a hell of a moment to ask for special treatment on war crimes.”
[Inter Press Service, 6/21/2004] The US will eventually withdraw the resolution knowing China will use its veto power. China’s ambassador to the UN, Wang Guangya, later explains that his country did not want to support a resolution that could grant impunity to people committing abuses like the ones that happened at Abu Ghraib. [New York Times, 6/5/2004] The “major diplomatic defeat,” as the Financial Times calls it, “also marked,” according to the Washington Post, “the most concrete evidence of a diplomatic backlash against the scandal over abuses of US detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
[Truthout (.org), 6/28/2004] However, even with the defeat at the Security Council there is little chance that the US will be brought before the court for any future alleged war crimes because of bilateral immunity agreements that are still in force between the US and several countries (see August 2002-July 1, 2003). [Inter Press Service, 6/21/2004]

A third round of the six-nation talks between North Korea, the US, China, South Korea, Russia, and Japan are held in Beijing. The talks begin promisingly, with the US offering to provide North Korea fuel aid if it freezes and then dismantles its nuclear program; Secretary of State Colin Powell meets with North Korea’s Foreign Minister, Paek Nam-sun, in the highest-level talks yet between the two countries. But the talks devolve into exchanges of insults between the US and North Korean leaders; George W. Bush calls Kim Jong Il a “tyrant” and Kim responds by calling Bush an “imbecile” and a “tyrant that puts [Nazi dictator Adolf] Hitler in the shade.” [BBC, 12/2007]

Brent Scowcroft, the foreign policy adviser who has increasingly become a figure of ridicule inside the administration (see March 8, 2003), is dismissed from the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Though Scowcroft is one of the most respected policy experts in Washington, and one of George H. W. Bush’s closest friends and colleagues, President Bush does not do him the courtesy of speaking to him personally about his dismissal. [Unger, 2007, pp. 326]

State Department official John Bolton, a neoconservative and arms control opponent who heads the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), defends the Bush administration record on North Korea. He is particularly dismissive of the North Koreans’ new, expanded nuclear weapons arsenal. “This is quibbling, to say they had two plutonium-based weapons and now they have seven,” Bolton says. “The uranium enrichment capability gives them the ability to produce an unlimited number.” Bolton asserts that the problem started during the Clinton administration, when, he says, Bill Clinton tried to normalize relations with North Korea and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was “dancing in Pyongyang and watching parades.” [Washington Post, 10/26/2004] In 2008, author J. Peter Scoblic will find Bolton’s mocking insouciance “shocking.” “In fact it was not quibbling,” he will write of the North Koreans’ expanded arsenal. “Having an extra half dozen weapons gave North Korea the freedom to use a few—or even sell a few—and still maintain an arsenal.” Scoblic will also note what Bolton does not, that North Korea is years away from producing any fissile material with its uranium enrichment program. [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 242]

John Bolton, a neoconservative and the Bush administration’s chief official in charge of arms reduction, says he does not believe that the unsecured nuclear weapons and items of nuclear technology belonging to the former Soviet Union pose any threat to US security. Three years earlier, a commission reported that Russian and other Eastern European “loose nukes” posed the single greatest danger to the US. “I don’t believe that at this point, or for some number of years, there’s been a significant risk of a Russian nuclear weapon getting into terrorist hands,” Bolton says. “I say that in part because of all the money we’ve spent… but also because the Russians themselves are completely aware that the most likely consequence of losing control of one of their own nuclear weapons is that it will be used in Russia.” [Washington Post, 10/26/2004] In 2008, author J. Peter Scoblic will write, “This assessment flew in the face of all available evidence regarding what had and had not been accomplished in Russia.” Only 54 percent of former Soviet facilities containing nuclear materials are under satisfactory security measures. The US has no idea how many Russian tactical nuclear weapons exist, where they are stored, or how well they are guarded, if they are guarded at all. Scoblic will write, “These are the weapons that nuclear experts calculate terrorists would most likely steal because their smaller size makes them easier to transport and conceal.” [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 209]

Secretary of State Colin Powell, having lent an air of gravitas and sobriety to the Bush administration during the re-election campaign, is told by White House chief of staff Andrew Card that he will not remain at his post for the second term. Powell agrees to pretend that he has decided to resign by his own choice rather than admit that he is being dismissed. [Unger, 2007, pp. 326]

President Bush signs into law the 2005 Consolidated Appropriations Act 2005 setting a $338 billion budget for “Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs.” Section 574 of the Act (see August 2, 2002) blocks the distribution of economic aid to countries that are party to the Rome Statute (see July 17, 1998) and have not signed “Article 98” agreements (see August 2002-July 1, 2003) with the US. The provision states: “None of the funds made available in this Act in title II under the heading `Economic Support Fund’ may be used to provide assistance to the government of a country that is a party to the International Criminal Court and has not entered into an agreement with the United States pursuant to Article 98 of the Rome Statute preventing the International Criminal Court from proceeding against United States personnel present in such country.” [Washington Post, 11/26/2002; US Congress, 11/20/2004; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12/3/2004]

Congress passes a law forbidding US troops in Colombia, who are there advising the government in its struggle against Marxist rebels funded by drug money, from engaging in any combat against the rebels except in self-defense. The law also caps the number of American soldiers deployed in Colombia at 800. President Bush issues a signing statement that only he, as the commander in chief, can place restrictions on the use of US armed forces. Therefore, the executive branch will construe the law “as advisory in nature.” [Boston Globe, 4/30/2006]

Incoming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, during her confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calls North Korea one of the world’s six “outposts of tyranny.” (The others are Cuba, Myanmar—which Rice identifies by its old name of Burma—Iran, Belarus, and Zimbabwe.) In 2008, author J. Peter Scoblic will cite Rice’s characterization as another example of overheated Bush administration rhetoric that makes it all the more difficult to negotiate with the obstinate North Koreans over their nuclear program (see August 2003). [US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1/18/2005 ; BBC, 12/2007; Scoblic, 2008, pp. 243]

Leading neoconservative Robert Kagan, speaking to the Los Angeles Times about the Bush administration’s foreign policies, says proudly: “This is real neoconservatism (see February 2, 2005). It would be hard to express it more clearly. If people were expecting Bush to rein in his ambitions and enthusiasms after the first term, they are discovering that they are wrong.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 327]

CIA Director Porter Goss tells the Senate: “Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-US jihadists. These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced in, and focused on, acts of urban terrorism. They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries.” [New York Times Magazine, 9/11/2005]

President Bush during his State of the Union address. [Source: American Rhetoric (.com)]In his State of the Union address, President Bush salutes the Iraqi voters and the US soldiers who made the recent national assembly elections possible (see January 30, 2005). Presenting Iraqi human rights advocate Safia Taleb al-Suharl as his special guest, Bush says that Iraq has finally turned the corner towards peace, democracy, and stability. Iraq is only the first, he continues: the US will foster “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Dimitri Simes, president of the more traditionally conservative Nixon Center, is aghast at Bush’s words and their implications. “If Bush means it literally,” Simes says, “then it means we have an extremist in the White House (see January 22, 2005). I hope and pray he didn’t mean it.” [White House, 2/2/2005; Unger, 2007, pp. 327]

North Korea announces it is suspending its participation in the ongoing talks over its nuclear program for what it calls an “indefinite period.” It blames the Bush administration’s efforts to “antagonize, isolate, and stifle [North Korea] at any cost.” North Korean officials also reiterate the claim that its nuclear weapons are intended for self-defense. [BBC, 12/2007]

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela accuses the US government of planning “new aggressions” against him. The aggressions, Chavez describes, include another attempted coup and an assassination attempt. Chavez warns US president George W. Bush that if an assassination attempt was successful the people of Latin America would assume that democratic rules “no longer apply.” Chavez warns that another consequence of his assassination would be an “interruption of the flow of oil to the US.” Chavez asks that Bush consider these consequences before making a decision about his assassination. [Venezuela Analysis, 2/20/2005]

Five US senators—John McCain (R-AZ), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Susan Collins (R-ME), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Russ Feingold (D-WI)—visit Kabul. McCain tells reporters that he is committed to a “strategic partnership that we believe must endure for many, many years.” He says that as part of this partnership, the US would provide “economic assistance, technical assistance, military partnership,… and… cultural exchange.” He also adds that in his opinion, this would mean the construction of “permanent bases.” The bases would help the US protect its “vital national security interests,” he explains. However, a spokesman for Afghan president Hamid Karzai reminds the press that the approval of a yet-to-be-created Afghan parliament would be needed before the Afghan government could allow the bases to be built. McCain’s office will later amend the senator’s comments, saying that he was advocating a long-term commitment to helping Afghanistan “rid itself of the last vestiges of Taliban and al-Qaeda.” That does not necessarily mean that the US will have to have permanent bases, the office explains. [Associated Press, 2/22/2005]

Janet Parshall. [Source: Camera (.org)]The United Nations holds a convention on the status of women around the globe, an event that was last held in 1995 in Beijing, China. The main purpose of the 2005 convention is to review and assess the protocols adopted during the previous one. [United Nations, 3/2005] President Bush sends Christian radio host Janet Parshall to represent the US at the convention. Parshall, aside from being a conservative Christian with a talk show, recently hosted what Salon will call a “hagiographic documentary” of Bush entitled “George W. Bush: Faith in the White House.” She has no experience in foreign affairs of any kind. [Salon, 1/6/2005]

The Joint Chiefs of Staff publish a classified draft document, the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations, laying out the rationale for the US’s use of nuclear weapons. It includes the possibility that nuclear weapons could be used during preemptive assaults on nations (see January 10, 2003) or even non-national organizations such as al-Qaeda. The draft states that nuclear weapons can be used: Against an adversary intending to use WMD against US, multinational, or allies’ forces or civilian populations; In the event of an imminent attack by biological weapons that only nuclear weapons can safely destroy; To attack deep, hardened bunkers containing chemical or biological weapons or the command and control infrastructure required for the adversary to execute a WMD attack against the United States or its allies; To counter potentially overwhelming adversary conventional forces; For rapid and favorable war termination on US terms; To ensure the success of US and multinational operations. In essence, the document gives a green light for the US military, as ordered by President Bush, to use nuclear weapons under almost any circumstances, against much less powerful adversaries. Author J. Peter Scoblic will write: “The Bush administration was blurring, if not erasing, the line between conventional and nuclear weapons and lowering the threshold at which the nation would go nuclear, proposing an array of tactical uses for weapons that were supposed to only be used in strategic conflicts. The Bush Pentagon was effectively acknowledging that the United States might use nuclear weapons first, against a nonnuclear state, before any hostilities had taken place.” The document actually replaced the term “nuclear war” with “conflict involving nuclear weapons” because the first phrase implies that both sides in a conflict were using nuclear weapons, and in all likelihood any nuclear weapons deployed under the conditions envisioned in the document would only be American. [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 180-181]

Venezuelan Navy Commander Armando Laguna announces that the Navy has detected a small fleet of US military vessels off the coast of Curacao in the Caribbean. The Venezuelan Armed Forces are monitoring the vessels, but Laguna says that the US vessels are conducting routine procedures and there is no reason to be alarmed. The presence of the US military has led to rumours about a US invasion, and another coup. William Lara, National Assembly Deputy, and leader of Chavez’s MVR party, says that the US vessels are part of “a plan to intimidate and provoke.” Concern for the vessels is sparked by the fact that the US military did not notify the Venezuelan Navy of their presence as Laguna says they “traditionally have been doing.” [Venezuela Analysis, 3/1/2005]

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declares that the US-sponsored project, the Free Trade Agreement for the Americas (FTAA), is dead. Chavez says that a new model will be put in place to increase trade between Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil regardless of the US government’s position. Chavez says that eventually a new organization similar to NATO will be established for the countries of South America. [VHeadline, 3/4/2005]

The Bush administration’s chief envoy to Southeast Asia, Christopher Hill, finally manages to make some progress in the ongoing six-way talks over North Korea’s nuclear program (see August 2003), largely by evading and ducking Bush administration restrictions on his negotiations. Hill is under orders not to open two-party talks with North Korea unless the North agrees to make significant concessions. (In 2008, author J. Peter Scoblic will observe, “Perversely, the Bush administration was offering negotiations in exchange for changed behavior, rather than using negotiations to change behavior; they had reversed the standard cause and effect of diplomacy.”) Hill persuades the North Koreans to return to the talks by arranging a dinner in Beijing for him and his North Korean counterpart, Li Gun. The Chinese hosts “fail” to show up, and Hill is left to dine with Gun alone. The North Koreans, happy with this “bilateral negotiation,” agree to rejoin the talks. Hill is unaware that Bush administration conservatives are planning to scuttle the negotiations (see September 19-20, 2005). [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 244] The talks will officially reopen on July 25, 2005. [BBC, 12/2007]

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